Tag Archives: Learning curve

My brother gave me a new camera for Christmas — a little red Nikon “Coolpix” that I can carry in a pocket if I want. I’d been using my brother’s camera, which is a bit bigger, and is 3 megapixels. My new one is 12 megapixels. Nice. I was able to download the stuff off the CDs that came with the camera onto my laptop, but couldn’t get the transfer software to run. So I had to have my brother download my pictures onto his computer and then move them to a flash drive for me.

Funny thing, though. The Nikon transfer software wouldn’t work properly on his computer, either. He always ended up having to transfer the pictures using his PhotoShop (not even the full version) program. So I wondered if there might be some alternate program I could use. I looked on SourceForge for Nikon photo transfer downloads, and my search results turned up several possibilities.

I downloaded one and tried it. No go.

Then I wondered “if PhotoShop can access the image files on the camera, maybe GIMP can, too,” and I connected my camera to my laptop and opened GIMP. It didn’t automatically open a prompt asking if I wanted to download the photos, but when I clicked on the “open” line in the menu, the camera showed up as a file location. I was able to open the folders in the camera drive and select the ones I wanted to transfer. I had to open them in GIMP and then save them separately, so it’s not perfect. It may be pretty time consuming if I have a lot of photos to transfer. But I can do it. Without having to return to microsoft slavery.

I’ve been using WordPress as my web site design and delivery mechanism since I started my own web site, Crazybasenji.com, two years ago. It spoiled me. I had previously taken some workshops in HTML and CSS sponsored by the tech department at a place of former employment. And when I say “former,” I mean 1999 – 2002. Turn of the century. So. Talking HTML 3.something, and CSS 0.1ish.

Those were the days when designing a website meant writing the code yourself, unless you had the wherewithal to buy a copy of Dreamweaver or FrontPage, or one of a few other webpage-generating programs that would write the code for you. I, of course, have never been blessed with a lot of disposable wherewithal, so if I wanted a website, I would have to build it myself, from scratch. It turned out I didn’t really want a website of my own that bad at that time. But I fancied myself just knowledgeable enough about how to do it to make me semi-dangerous. I kept offering to help with websites that belonged to organizations I was a member of. It’s probably fortunate that my offers got ignored.

Recently my bluff got called, as it were, and I found myself taking over as webmaster of a website that was suffering from a case of nearly terminal neglect. Six or more of the pages had been flying the “under construction” flag for at least the past five years. I just deleted them. There was too much to do to get the other pages cleaned up and working without having to create content for pages that would have to be updated as soon as I finished them, and frequently thereafter.

My big plan was to replace the whole website with a slick WordPress theme that would make the whole updating process a lot faster and easier. That got shot down immediately. The other members wanted to keep the appearance the same. They wanted to keep certain things on the home page and were concerned that without the “hit counters” in the footer, we wouldn’t know how many people were visiting the site. I didn’t feel it was my place to tell them about other ways of obtaining that information. After all, the previous webmaster was the one with all the experience maintaining web sites. I’m just a blogger.

So I have had a crash refresher course in writing, re-writing, and editing HTML, because that is how the whole site was built. There are no style sheets — no external style sheets, no embedded style sheets, no in-line style declarations. Which means there’s no universal page template to set background color, font style, text color, or anything else that should be uniform throughout the site. And on a few pages, the code for background color was not quite the same as on other pages, so there was no background color at all. On many pages, the links had been edited (or something) and no longer functioned, and the spacing between the links was irregular or missing altogether. Someone had put a lot of effort into formating the links on the home page and then dropped the ball on the other pages. I created a separate file for the links, and then used that to copy and paste over the code for the links on each page, and then removed the link for that particular page. I was pretty proud of the result, I have to say. Or more to the point, I was relieved that I got it to work.

There’s still a lot to be done, because I’m determined to introduce style sheets into the mix and eliminate some of the table formatting, but I have to work those things in with all the other projects I have going on, not to mention the small matter of doing something to make a living. One thing at a time.

So much for this episode in the continuing saga of my adventures in doing things I never thought I’d be doing — or any good at doing.

Well, crap. It looks like I’m out of the PostAWeek race. My last post, on 30 January, was two weeks ago. I guess it’s true that time flies whether you’re having fun or not. Now I reckon I’ll have to remove that cute badge from the sidebar. I don’t want to advertise falsely, or anything.

One thing I won’t do is blame the weather, which was a lot worse in other places than here, or power outages, which we didn’t have, or computer failure, which hasn’t happened. I just got distracted by other projects…, and going to work…, and television….

Today I started working on a project for my local Kennel Club. Our annual dog show is coming up and I’m contacting all the judges to find out what lodging and transportation arrangements they want us to make for them. I have some “form letters” to use to paste into emails, and I’ve been making some modifications based on how they are traveling, etc. My word processor has been crashing every time I “copy/paste” before I get to the “paste” part. Gahhhh! At first I thought it was because I had one of the files saved in a different folder than the others I was using, but it still happened after I moved all the files into the same folder. I’ll probably have to send a “bug report” somewhere. But first I need to finish those letters.

Still, I am not tempted to think “this wouldn’t happen if I was still using windows or microsoft or mac,” because obviously there would be the chance that exactly the same thing could happen in any of those environments. The difference with my environment is that I don’t have to “start over.” Even though when my program recovers the files that closed when the program crashed, I can’t just paste the passages I had copied, all I have to do is click on a little clipboard icon on my tool bar and there is the text I want. I don’t need to go back and click and drag through the letter again (which could just make it crash again), I just click on the line I want on my clipboard, and paste it into the document where I want it. Not a perfect solution, but not as much of a pain in the ass as others.

Yesterday as I was browsing the Linux links, I stopped and read this article on Ubuntu User about the next release of Ubuntu including the Banshee media player as the default player included with the download. I was curious enough to go to the Banshee site to see what kind of features it included. As soon as I saw the line about “Sync your music and videos to your Android, iPod, iPhone, or other device – or import its media,” I thought it might be the answer to the issues I’ve been having with my iPod Nano.

When I installed Xubuntu, the default music player was Exaile. It is a nice enough music player, but it took me a while to figure out how to import my music files, and I never could get it to import from a CD. If you visit the Exaile site, you may find, like I did, that the descriptions of its features are written in code. I don’t mean machine code, exactly, but for a non-techie like myself, it might as well be. The wiki for the player is not much more helpful. But at least I was able to use it for the music files I had. Later I found another application that I could use to copy my CDs to my hard drive. From there I could add them to my Exaile collection. Extra steps, involving extra apps. Not cool. And I still couldn’t sync my Nano. The software I had downloaded for that didn’t work — I suspect because my iPod was, in fact, a Nano, and not a standard issue iPod. So I had three separate programs to handle my music, and not well, at that. I decided to give Banshee a try.

Because I have a handy service in my Applications folder called Ubuntu Software Center, I didn’t have to download the app from the Banshee site. I just found it on my list and clicked “install.” And spent most of yesterday test driving it. It did everything as advertised — charged and added music to my Nano and my old Shuffle, imported music from some new CDs with no problems, and generally gave me no reason to regret giving up iTunes. It definitely gets my vote for media center of choice.

Since I started using Linux on my laptop, I’ve thought of a lot of things to say about Linux on my regular blog, Crazybasenji.com. I started off with a post about how I decided to try Linux, and some of my first experiences with it. However, some of my readers might not be interested in reading so much about computer stuff, especially if they primarily read my blog for the basenji stories. So I decided to start a spin-off blog (kind of like how CSI spun off CSI Miami, and then CSI New York, etc.). So stay tuned.